Kevin Mumford

Professor
African-American History
Office:  174 Schaeffer Hall
Office Hours:  M/W 9:00 - 10:30 or by appointment
Phone Number:  (319) 335-2329
Email: 

kevin-mumford@uiowa.edu

Kevin Mumford is Professor in the Department of History and the Program in African American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He received his PhD in history from Stanford University, and AB in history from the University of Wisconsin. His teaching and research cover the history of African Americans from 1500-2000, race relations in the United States and in comparative perspective, the history of sexuality, and LGBT studies. His publications seek to document the experience, and explain the causes, of social inequality in modern America in diverse periods and contexts, and across categories of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. He also writes on constructions of identity and the intersections of identification throughout U.S. history.
His first book, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 1997), attempted to revise the history of what was at the time termed “miscegenation” (or interracial relations) by documenting a remarkable underworld of interracial dance halls, streetwalking and strolling, white dance hostesses serving Asian patrons, and a bold gay and lesbian nightlife. These interzones of Harlem and Chicago attracted the patronage of wealthier white slummers but also ignited anti-miscegenation panics, including renewed efforts to pass laws against interracial marriage.
His second book project is a case study of the long history of civil rights and Black Power in an important twentieth-century city, Newark, New Jersey. Published in 2007, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America is a study of the policies of integration—anti-discrimination codes, public housing, grassroots activism--and their demise. His recent writing on African American urban politics again tries to think critically about the effects of race and racism. “Harvesting the Crisis: The Newark Uprising, the Kerner Commission, and Writings on Riots,” in African American Urban History Since World War II, Kenneth Kusmer and Joe Trotter, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009) compares several types of explanations for the causes of riots. Drawing on the presidential papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the article examines how authorities and activists manipulated the definition of the urban crisis to serve a range of ulterior objectives. 

The new research project is a history of black gay identities and politics from around the 1963 March on Washington until the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The book will examine major themes in gay history as well as African American history: connections between civil rights and gay rights, black power and gay liberation, the search for personal connection and belonging, the mobilization of identity politics, and the impact of defeat and loss on communities. The research involves a lot of local archival digging for personal and organizational records, community newspapers, and oral history. The book will narrate a collective biography of several important figures about whom little has been written: Aaron Payne (a hustler and performer); Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald (a Catholic gay liberation activist); Joseph Beam (poet and cultural activist); Reverend James Tinney (academic and theologian). Mumford is always eager to hear from anyone who remembers these men or has information or sources pertaining to black gay history in general.
 

Teaching: 

Courses recently taught include:

  • 16A:051 Colloquium for History Majors (American)
  • 16A:065 /129:065 Introduction to African American History
  • 16A:185 /129:189 Themes in African American History
  • 16A:188 African American History 1865 to Present
  • 16:245 Readings in African American Historiography
  • 16:267 Seminar on Contemporary United States
  • 16:286 /91:652 Law & Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1955-65 (co-taught)
Awards & Service: 
  • Chair, Committee on the Status of Minority Historians, Organization of American Historians (2006-2007)
  • Plenary Lecturer, “Black Queer Studies: A Symposium,” at Northwestern University (January 2006)
  • Chair and Facilitator, “10 th Anniversary Celebration of the Center For African American Urban Studies and the Economy, at Carnegie Mellon University (October 2005)
  • Schomburg Fellow, Center for Research in Black Culture (2004-2005)
  • History Fellow, Liberal Arts and Law Fellowship, Harvard Law School (deferred) (2001)
  • Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University (1999)
  • Scholar in Residence, Brown University (1999)
  • Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (1997)
  • Rockefeller Foundation, Race and Ethnicity Program, Center for Race and Ethnicity, Universidad Rio Federal, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1996)